Potato Pancakes (Zemiakové Placky)

Fried potato pancakes (vyprážané zemiakové placky, also called haruľa) are quite popular in Slovakia. They are made out of potato dough just like lokshe, but are made out of uncooked potatoes and are fried in oil. Potato pancakes are usually eaten as a snack, but you can serve them as a side with soups and some meals. They are very similar to Jewish latkes, but they have few additional spices. Potato pancakes are very easy to make and are super delicious. Try them today!

Using a fine food grater, shred 2 or 3 large peeled potatoes. Then take a strainer and press it down on the potato shreddings. Turn the pot over and drain out as much water as possible. You can also take a wooden spoon and press out more water. Then repeat with the strainer.

Next shred half of a small onion and 1 or 2 cloves of garlic.

Add one egg, salt, marjoram, ground black pepper, onion and garlic.

Also add one tablespoon of flour. Mix together.

Heat up oil. Then add about two tablespoons of potato mixture per pancake. Be careful here, because if water is left in the mixture, the oil will splatter out. Use the back side of the spoon to flatten out the pancake. Fry each side for about 4 minutes, until the pancakes get nicely dark brown. It helps to use two spatulas when flipping the pancakes.

I like to place my finished pancakes on a paper towel and then fold the ends over to soak up the oil. Serve warm. The pancakes should be crunchy on the outside and nice and juicy on the inside. Serve with milk. At least that’s how I like to eat them. Enjoy! Then learn how to make langoš, fried dough snack sold by street vendors throughout Slovakia and the Czech republic.

I usually eat these as a light snack or instead of bread with soup. I am sure you could serve them with meat. Yeah, lokše are little different. They are almost like pita bread. These pancakes are more like hashbrowns, but the potatoes are of finer consistency.

Hi!
Yes You can make them with beef stew and the recipe we call is: polovnicka kapsa. You just make potatoe pancake and in the different pot beef stew with vegetables and serve them together. Or put beef stew inside potatoe pancake and make “pocket”. Polovnicka kapsa-Hunter pocket.

AHOJ TO ALL I MADE MY PANACAKES BUT MISS THE ZAKIANSKA ?????? ( YOU KNOW THE THICK LIQUID YOGURT DRINK) WITH THEM ALSO GOOD WITH LOKSE ..SORRY FOR THE ZKIANKA OR HOWEVER IT IS SPELLED BUT IT MAKES FOR A GREAT MEAL …YUMMY ON TO NEW RECIPES

These look “similar” to loksa — however; I think loksa is more of a batter, like pancakes or crepes — can you post a recipe and technique for loksa, please? Thanks, nice site — and good information. My ancestors are from Brezina in the Trebisov region.

I have not tried making lokše yet, but here is the recipe: Chop up a head of cabbage, add about 4 cups flour, salt and black pepper (and water?). Mix together to make dough. With a rolling pin roll out pieces about 3mm thick. Bake on non-greased hot plate. Brush finished lokše with melted lard/butter.

This recipe is deceptively simple, I’ve had many awful potato pancakes here in Prague. Greasy and slimy. I suspect straining out the excess water and cooking correctly with a minimal amount of oil makes a world of difference. I will give this a try at home, thanks for the recipe and pics.

They are also quite popular in Poland. ‘Placki ziemniaczane’ – I bet you can see the connection 😉 Placki ziemniaczane are delicious with sour cream or even just with salt. And I know quite a few people who eat these with sugar, I guess you add way less pepper, garlic, onion etc. I’m stranded in the UK atm, so I will definitely have a go with these 😀
Pronounciation: platskee zyemnyatshaneh 🙂

Hi Lubos-fantastic site! Your recipe is almost identical to ones I use to make latkes. Here’s a neat trick i learned recently to help get all the excess water out of the grated potato: wrap it up in a clean dry dishtowel and then squeeze! It really works.

Hey, I’ve found that using leftover mashed potatoes instead of grated ones works just as well and you don’t need to strain them. Also, potato pancakes make the best breakfast if you’re not into traditional breakfast dishes, since you can put literally anything in them. I suggest diced peppers, bits of ham, bacon or sausage (leftovers, again), chives, celery, and especially cheese. Don’t use too much stuff though or there won’t be much potato in your pancake. They are great with ketchup, if you’re an uncultured hick like me. 😀

This potato pancake also very popular in Hungary. Hungarian names are lepcsánka (in eastern Hungary), tócsni (in the northern mountains near the Hungary-Slovakia border)or cicege, macok, krumpliprósza (in western Hungary). In the Czech Republic this pancake called bramboracky as far as I know.

Peter, thanks for the cultural info. You are right, in Czech, haruľa is known as bramborák (plural bramboráky). The “č” in bramboráčky turns it into the diminutive form. This is very common in our language. I am not sure if something similar exists in Hungarian. The name comes from the Czech word for potatoes (zemiaky in Slovak) – brambory.

My Hungarian Grandmother always made these and they were delecious, I couldn’t get enough. She called them lepcsánka, and we ate them as fast as she could get them out of the frying pan. And she always used rendered pork (bacon?) fat for cooking.

Hi Luboš, Great website! I feel homesick just browsing the recipes. I made these potato pancakes for my friend here in Montreal and she would not stop asking me to make them again and again ever since. The recipe you posted is exactly as the one we make at home. And marjoram is the key spice in the recipe for sure. At home, we usually eat them accompanied with sour / butter milk, but here I started eating them with thick yogurt on the side and I love it. Good job again with the website. It inspires me to cook more Slovak dishes for my friends here.

this is my favourite food, i always make loads. yummy. i also fry it with pork schnitzel inside. put a layer of potatoe dough on the pan and then meat and cover it with more dough. it fry nicely together and usually satisfied the meat lovers. i believe it is called cernohorsky rezen, but i dont know how to translate that..

I love schnitzel covered in potato pancake! I had it for the first time this past winter in a restaurant in Banska Bystrica. It was so good. I don’t remember what they called it there, but I believe it was something else than cernohorsky rezen (black mountain schnitzel). According to my dad, who is also in the restaurant business, there is no standard name for that dish, and every restaurant owner calls it something else.

We call this “baba”. We also put in lots of small chunks of fried bacon. We bake it on a no stick cookie sheet that has been greased with the bacon fat plus add some of the bacon fat to the potato mix. Bake at about 350 till brown and crisp on bottom, the baking time depends on the kind of potato you use – the white are better than the yukon Golds. We then serve them with sour cream and if you like a nice cold glass of buttermilk.

I like these with a couple of broiled porkchops and applesauce. This site is amazing to me. It seems to have already covered every slovak dish im my mother’s repertoir! I work a rotating shift, so I have been totally out of synch with my family’s schedule since I found this. I can’t wait to show my wife how to prepare these great dishes!

Hi there lubos, great site, dunno why I never thought to google slovak food? Talking about platsky, I am the South African King of platsky, (Im sure), this was my favourite dish until my parents went over to slovakia and discovered cerohorsky rezen, but my mother makes it with exactly this dough, but with pork neck, which is the most juiciest part, its a bit tricky to make, first put a layer of the dough in the pan and then the pork neck, then put more dough on top, once the bottom is getting crispy, flip it quickly.

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Posting is not necessarily about potato pancakes, (which we always had with lentil soup, like the Matt Warhola says above). Yesterday I came across this article online and it’s interesting. But for all the years I’ve made kolache and so with all the women in our family, I’ve never seen meat enclosed in this dough? Is this native to the Czech’s or a Czech innovation? Czech bakeries have been getting a lot of press recently. I visited one in West, TX and was disappointed in their products. Too many iterations/innovations?

Try a salad spinner to dewater the shredded potatoes. Also, using a food processor to shred the potatoes and the onion is much quicker. By shredding slowly in the food processor which allows for finer cuts helps to remove water as well.

Then turning all the wet ingredients into the salad spinner centrifuges out all the casual water clinging to the shredded onion and potato mixture. After dewatering, all ingredients can be combined in a bowl and the zemiakové placky can be prepared as usual.

These two tricks help to speed up the process and makes a better pancake to boot, crisp and crunchy on the outside and soft and steamy on the inside. Beginning from a cold kitchen, I can be cooking in about ten minutes or less. But then I am a retired chemist who always prided himself on his lab technique aka mise en place in the kitchen.

I have not added marjoram, but certainly will the next time I make these treats.

I also recommend saving that bacon grease for these instead of using vegetable oil. I know, I know. I just lost some with this comment, but you should really look at the differences in the fatty acid contents between these oils as being minor, which they are.

Pork fat has gotten an undeserved bad name from the Food Police. Make a small batch with each oil. Don’t tell you guests and see which batch gets eaten first!

I have been trying to find a recipe for a dish that incorporates potato pancakes. It is strips or pieces of beef or pork, sauteed with peppers and possibly onions. It was served everywhere in Bratislava when I was there in the mid-1990s. It was sometimes served on a “puffy” potato pancake. I have searched the web many times and not found it. Any ideas?? It may be called by a name in Slovak that translates to “Black Mountain.”

I, too, have been looking for a recipe for that dish. Similarly, I ate it almost every night I was in Bratislava. It was delicious. Multiple attempts to find it online by searching on Black Mountain have been unfruitful. Anyone?

Thanks much for the very helpful web site and recipe. Amazing that comments on it have been going on for over 4 years.

At our suburb northwest of Atlanta, a Slovak chef named Stefan Bencik operated a restaurant called Slovakia, a little like the places west of Chicago, where he served these potato pancakes wrapped around a sort of chicken paprikash and much other, wonderful food.

Alas, the restaurant is long gone, with no trace of chef Bencik. It was one of my wife’s all time favorite dishes and restaurants, so I make a version at home from time to time.

We miss the wonderful Eastern European food and Stefan. Thanks again for reminding us of the delicious dish!

1. heat small well-seasoned cast iron skillet on medium-low heat for 5-10 minutes.
2. put 2-3 dashes salt, pepper and marjoran to taste in cereal bowl.
3. Coarsely grate raw potatos and garlic into bowl.
4. put whole chicken egg into bowl on top of bowl contents, and mix together well with fingers of one hand to make sure seasoning is well mixed in.
5. with other hand, put 1/2 teaspoon sunflower oil into hot small cast iron skillet, holding up and moving around to coat bottom and halfway up the sides.
6. put skillet back on stove burner, and put handfuls of potato mixture into hot pan, trying to get evenly distributed around pan, but do not push down hard on the contents.
7. cook over medium heat.
8. after about 4 minutes, shake skillet in circular motion to loosen a little from sides of pan. Let cook for 4+ minutes more until lightly brown on sides of bramborak.
9. slip out of skillet onto plate, with browned side down onto the plate.
10. put pan upside down over the uncooked side of the bramborak.
11. turn the plate and skillet over, so that bramborak falls directly into the skillet.
12. put back on stove burner to cook for another 4+ minutes until browned.
13. when brown enough, turn out onto plate and enjoy !

My husband is Slovak and he taught me to cook those with a kind of chicken (could be pork) casserole that’s spicy and with some ketchup too, he calls the casserole stroganoff, but of course that is not the correct name!

Potato pancakes were always served with pork in my house. My mother taught me to “lace” the pancakes during frying, basically put a few holes with your wooden spoon into the frying batter. This assures that the centers won’t be so doughy.

My mother use to make potato pan cakes. I tried to make them but they turned out like hash browns.
One thing I know is that she did not fine grate the potatoes. I would like to learn how to make them. Can any one help PLEASE.

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